In recent years, thousands of good-paying American jobs have
been sent overseas. Free trade has made it much easier for corporations
to do business elsewhere, but free trade does not make it easier
to protect workers and the environment elsewhere. This results
in lost American jobs and downward pressure on American wages
and benefits; leading to just what short-sighted leaders in the
world business community hoped for - to make quarterly results
better.

But the truth is that there
are very few "American" corporations of any size left.
An even sadder truth is that many of these large multinationals
no longer value employees as people, they see labor as nothing
more than a commodity. And in the last ten years, they have seen
small investors as a commodity as well.

The examples of corporations
taking advantage of laborers and consumers are well-known. Enron
bragged of how they cheated grandmothers who depended on them
for electricity in California, and also cheated their own employees
by recommending they buy more stock in their pension funds as
company executives were selling. Tyco¡s top officers used
millions of investor dollars for their own personal expenses.
American Airlines¡ former chairman secretly took huge pay
increases while negotiating pay cuts for the company¡s
pilots, flight attendants and mechanics.

There are many reasons for
all this, including a lack of moral tone set by the federal government.
Congress and the Bush administration allow and encourage this
behavior.

Tyco, for example, is an "American"
company headquartered in Bermuda. This allows them to avoid a
lot of American taxes and at the same time makes it harder for
small investors to get information and accountability from the
leadership in the company.

Most CEOs, whose pay has skyrocketed
despite lousy performance over the past few years, have a majority
of insiders on their boards while the outside directors are hand
picked. There is no "corporate conscience" unless the
CEO wants one.

Corporate governance is often
a matter of state law. Delaware has thousands of businesses incorporated
there simply because Delaware laws make it more difficult than
most states to enforce the obligations that directors have to
shareholders.

If we want more and better
jobs, a fair trade policy, better behavior by corporate leaders,
more pay equity between those who work and those who lead and
better corporate morals, we need to make that happen by doing
the following:

" Insist that Congress
stop voting for trade agreements with no enforceable labor or
environmental standards.

"Government contracts
should be preferentially given to real American companies, particularly
defense contracts.

"Open the election process
for directors of publicly owned corporations so investors can
easily nominate and elect outside directors. Public ownership
of companies should mean public majorities on the boards - in
other words more outside directors that are not hand picked by
CEOs.

"Hold CEOs accountable
for what they say. If pay packages for workers are determined
by merit and by results, so should the pay packages of corporate
leadership. Hypocrisy leads to disrespect, which undermines any
organization.

The stakes are high. America
is rapidly losing its dominant position in the world economy
as jobs move elsewhere and Americans lose faith in the moral
leadership of the business community. Small businesses and small
communities are the first casualties of corporate indifference
and of our falling standard of living. If we want a strong America,
we need a strong business community.